Friday, November 26, 2010

Limitations of Apologetics @jrdkirk

I used to love apologetics when I first became a Christian. I was considering it as a career. However, as I came to explore the questions honestly, I found apologetics less-than-helpful. Two quotes from Kirk's article really stuck to explain this for me:

In particular, it gives people answers to questions that they often haven’t asked themselves and therefore cannot feel the weight of. The answer seems to work because they’ve never had to use it to minister to their own heart or mind.

This is a really excellent point and is some of the rationale behind this blog. We need to personally struggle with the issues rather than being given simple, pat answers, no matter how good they are. Without the wrestling, the answer is not terribly meaningful.

The other quote was:

Apologetics is bad for my soul. I’d rather have no answer to my doubts than a bad one.

This is just awesome! So many times our desire for clarity and answers leads us to bad answers rather than acknowledging that some things are a mystery. And some bad answers just make things worse. They close us off to the Truth of God and complexity of life with Christ, however simple those things can be at times.